Four #2
Clement continued, “And I assume nobody else knew you had a usual lunch spot, Jehan. So Ysabel expected to come, and instead she’s dead. I don’t think that she would give out lunch invitations as a form of suicide note. Would anyone disagree?”
Nobody would.
“Someone killed her,” said Clement. Their fingertip smeared a crumb of cheese into paste.
“Or she burned out,” said Estiene. “I don’t see why we should be leaping to assume murder.”
“Ysabel, burn out?” said Moyna. “Of everyone in our cohort, she’s the last person I’d expect.”
“I’d not expect her to cheat at the Grand Exam either,” Estiene fired back. “But if she wrote this note, then she did.”
“And remember what happened with Konrad?” said Jehan. “He was one of the strongest mages at the Academie, and that didn’t protect him.”
Moyna glared at him, probably for not siding with her against Estiene.
Konrad Omeyer was in their cohort but had begun two years ahead of them.
He’d come closer to burning out, the rumour went, than a scholar ever had who’d lived to talk about it afterward.
Not that he did talk about it. He’d taken a full year off to recover his health and his magic, and was now doing his fifth year of studies along with the rest of them.
“Ysabel pushed herself,” said Jehan. “We all know that. Burnout isn’t just how much magic you have, it’s how careful you are about working within your limits. And Ysabel didn’t care for limits.”
He checked to see if Clement agreed. They had very arresting eyes, once you bothered to look, and once those eyes bothered to hold yours rather than taking you in and glancing away. A sort of dark blue tinged with river green. They gave him an unwilling nod.
“Why would she have been in the exam gallery in the first place?” said Moyna. “The day before the Grand Exam? The artificers were working there.”
“I don’t know,” said Clement. “Perhaps they’d finished and she wanted to practice on her own?”
There were practice rooms in the library, but most of them would have been booked out by groups, and it was forbidden to do any actual magic in the study carrels. Perhaps, if you wanted somewhere quieter than your room in halls, where you could mentally prepare yourself for the Grand Exam . . .
“Which brings us back to the prospect of burning out,” said Jehan.
“Or murder,” said Alys, leaning forward. “Ysabel’s research project was on echo headaches. That’s one of Saige’s specialties. What if he found out she was about to upstage him, and he wanted to steal her work? It’d explain why she and Brodier wanted to keep it secret until it was ready to present.”
Rogier Saige was the Academie’s Dean of Curriculum. He and Brodier treated one another with the rigorous professional courtesy of two people who were not friends.
“Why wouldn’t Ysabel have been working with him, if she was interested in that topic?” said Jehan. “Why Brodier at all?”
There was a difficult pause.
Alys said, “Perhaps she preferred Brodier’s supervision style.”
Hadn’t there been rumours about Alys and Saige—last year?
The year before? Saige was popular. He’d supervise pretty much anyone who asked, and was devastating in a laconic, silver-haired way.
Shit, Jehan wouldn’t have minded having a go himself.
But everyone knew Saige preferred women.
As it was, Jehan only saw Saige once per term, when he nodded and told Jehan he was doing great work, keep it up.
Which suited Jehan perfectly. A nosier supervisor might have asked where he was getting his data from, and Jehan tried to only tell the really necessary lies.
“Anyway,” Alys said. “We’ll have to consider him. And Brodier herself, obviously. Perhaps the project was actually a complete failure and Brodier wanted to hide that fact, to preserve her academic reputation. What else?”
“Dux Scolaris,” said Moyna. “How about it, Estiene? Want to confess?”
“Very funny,” snarled Estiene. “You might as well point your finger at Lysande Coran—her marks this year are as good as mine. And she’s obsessed with getting the junior theatre-track job, and there’s only one of those, so she’s got twice as much reason as me to care about Dux.”
Alys said quickly, “I still think blackmail is a possibility. Blackmailers are always good murder victims.”
“Yes, in your precious stage-plays. Did you miss your true calling as a gendarme, Alys?” Estiene demanded. “Or a playwright? Blackmail, really?”
“At least she’s taking this seriously,” said Clement.
“By calling your best friend a blackmailer?”
Clement’s jaw twitched. They began to raise a hand to their arm again, then dropped it.
If Jehan reached out and sent magic through them, it would show the high sour notes of muscles held too tense, too long.
You could see it in the angle of their shoulder; in the way their sternocleidomastoid carved shadows in their neck.
Clement said tightly, “Ysabel enjoyed being the person in the room who knew the most. Always. She’d make a perfect blackmailer, except that I can’t think of a single thing that she wanted.”
She wouldn’t want anything except for you to know that she knew, Jehan thought.
Ysabel would lean across this exact table in this exact teahouse and tell you your secret in that laughing, so-certain voice, and she’d wait for your face to change as your future turned to dust before your eyes.
Then she’d laugh again, and promise to take that secret with her into the flame of death.
And so she had.
“If someone found out that she was cheating by stealing the exam cases, they might have tried to blackmail her,” said Alys. “And then . . . killed her when she refused to pay up?”
Jehan tried to imagine someone blackmailing Ysabel, and Ysabel’s likely reaction. He didn’t know whether to laugh or wince.
“I really can’t believe she’d do that. Cheat, I mean,” said Clement. They looked back at the letter—evidence to the contrary in Ysabel’s own hand—and frowned.
Letter aside, Jehan decided that he could believe it after all.
No, Ysabel didn’t need to cheat, but that had never stopped her before.
Ysabel did indeed want to know the most, and wanted you to know she knew it.
And if she was bursting with her own cleverness at having gotten away with something, and wanted to talk about it, she might well choose Jehan.
She’d expect him to hold her crimes secret, just as she held his.
And if the gendarmes waited for the geas to expire, pulled their thumbs out of their arses, and decided to question them all properly about any potentially blackmailable secrets—if they poked even half-heartedly into their lives, starting with those of them who weren’t rich and beautiful and possessed of influential names—then Jehan’s future could be dust after all.
Unless the five of them came up with an answer themselves in the meantime.
“I believe we should concentrate on our own Grand Exam and let the gendarmes sort it out next week,” said Estiene. “That’s their job. This is ours.”
And that settled it. Jehan could have the satisfaction of opposing Estiene after all.
He said, “The exam will only eat an hour of each day. Why not see if we can solve a murder in the rest of our time? Think of it like a clinical question for extra credit, Estiene. You like those.”
He felt great about Estiene’s glare, and only a little bit shitty at Clement’s look of fierce gratitude.
Clement wanted justice. Alys wanted a good story.
Jehan wasn’t quite convinced this was anything more than a tragic case of burnout, but he wanted this sorted out in the next five days.
He was escaping Sieuxerr, for the next three years, and nothing could be allowed to get in the way of that.
Moyna hesitated, clearly realised she was now stuck as the last holdout on Estiene’s side, and said, “All right. I’m in. We don’t need you to participate, Estiene. You can go and study like a good little boy.”
That had a predictable effect.
“Fine,” snapped Estiene. “We do have four more exam cases to do together. I suppose I can let you all waste my time, if it makes us a more harmonious group.”
Harmonious. What a joke.
Their lunch party broke up with grudging agreement to—as Alys put it—start asking around today, and bring their best theories and suspects to the table tomorrow.
And because it had been that kind of morning and was clearly shaping up to be that kind of day, Jehan and Estiene found themselves setting off in the same direction.
Jehan tried to use his longer legs to create distance between them, but it didn’t work.
Estiene could do a great impression of a burr caught in your robe.
Estiene shot a look up at Jehan. Sunlight caught and glittered in the heart of a jewel near the top of his ear. Probably a fucking diamond. Healers went barehanded, by tradition, so many of them adorned their ears instead. Estiene took it further than most.
Mathé’s sacred spark, why had Estiene cut his fucking hair like that, anyway?
“I’m going to the Hospital,” said Estiene.
“So am I.”
“What for?”
“To see my mother,” said Jehan. And to ask her to tap the rumour mill among the Hospital’s medics, orderlies, and nurses, to see if Ysabel had managed to piss anyone off to the point where they’d risk the death penalty that came with killing a healer. “You?”
“Danisy is directing a healing this afternoon. In utero. Very complex. Papa said there might be a place in the array for me, if I had a morning exam slot.”
“Of course he did.”
Estiene gave him a poisonous look and actually pulled ahead.